Robust Generalization of Graph Neural Networks for Carrier Scheduling

Battery-free sensor tags are devices that leverage backscatter techniques to communicate with standard IoT devices, thereby augmenting a network's sensing capabilities in a scalable way. For communicating, a sensor tag relies on an unmodulated carrier provided by a neighboring IoT device, with a schedule coordinating this provisioning across the network. Carrier scheduling--computing schedules to interrogate all sensor tags while minimizing energy, spectrum utilization, and latency--is an NP-Hard optimization problem. Recent work introduces learning-based schedulers that achieve resource savings over a carefully-crafted heuristic, generalizing to networks of up to 60 nodes. However, we find that their advantage diminishes in networks with hundreds of nodes, and degrades further in larger setups. This paper introduces RobustGANTT, a GNN-based scheduler that improves generalization (without re-training) to networks up to 1000 nodes (100x training topology sizes). RobustGANTT not only achieves better and more consistent generalization, but also computes schedules requiring up to 2x less resources than existing systems. Our scheduler exhibits average runtimes of hundreds of milliseconds, allowing it to react fast to changing network conditions. Our work not only improves resource utilization in large-scale backscatter networks, but also offers valuable insights in learning-based scheduling.

FMM-Head: Enhancing Autoencoder-based ECG anomaly detection with prior knowledge

Detecting anomalies in electrocardiogram data is crucial to identifying deviations from normal heartbeat patterns and providing timely intervention to at-risk patients. Various AutoEncoder models (AE) have been proposed to tackle the anomaly detection task with ML. However, these models do not consider the specific patterns of ECG leads and are unexplainable black boxes. In contrast, we replace the decoding part of the AE with a reconstruction head (namely, FMM-Head) based on prior knowledge of the ECG shape. Our model consistently achieves higher anomaly detection capabilities than state-of-the-art models, up to 0.31 increase in area under the ROC curve (AUROC), with as little as half the original model size and explainable extracted features. The processing time of our model is four orders of magnitude lower than solving an optimization problem to obtain the same parameters, thus making it suitable for real-time ECG parameters extraction and anomaly detection.

Fast Server Learning Rate Tuning for Coded Federated Dropout

In cross-device Federated Learning (FL), clients with low computational power train a common machine model by exchanging parameters updates instead of potentially private data. Federated Dropout (FD) is a technique that improves the communication efficiency of a FL session by selecting a subset of model variables to be updated in each training round. However, FD produces considerably lower accuracy and higher convergence time compared to standard FL. In this paper, we leverage coding theory to enhance FD by allowing a different sub-model to be used at each client. We also show that by carefully tuning the server learning rate hyper-parameter, we can achieve higher training speed and up to the same final accuracy of the no dropout case. For the EMNIST dataset, our mechanism achieves 99.6 % of the final accuracy of the no dropout case while requiring 2.43x less bandwidth to achieve this accuracy level.

DeepGANTT: A Scalable Deep Learning Scheduler for Backscatter Networks

Recent backscatter communication techniques enable ultra low power wireless devices that operate without batteries while interoperating directly with unmodified commodity wireless devices. Commodity devices cooperate in providing the unmodulated carrier that the battery-free nodes need to communicate while collecting energy from their environment to perform sensing, computation, and communication tasks. The optimal provision of the unmodulated carrier limits the size of the network because it is an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem. Consequently, previous works either ignore carrier optimization altogether or resort to suboptimal heuristics, wasting valuable energy and spectral resources. We present DeepGANTT, a deep learning scheduler for battery-free devices interoperating with wireless commodity ones. DeepGANTT leverages graph neural networks to overcome variable input and output size challenges inherent to this problem. We train our deep learning scheduler with optimal schedules of relatively small size obtained from a constraint optimization solver. DeepGANTT not only outperforms a carefully crafted heuristic solution but also performs within ~3% of the optimal scheduler on trained problem sizes. Finally, DeepGANTT generalizes to problems more than four times larger than the maximum used for training, therefore breaking the scalability limitations of the optimal scheduler and paving the way for more efficient backscatter networks.